Trumka: Voters don’t want to go back

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said as he wrapped up campaigning in Philadelphia on Election Day that voters “don’t want to go back to the times when Wall Street controlled everything including the federal government. No matter who gets elected, it’s about jobs, jobs and more jobs. It’s about the economy.”

Exit poll results released early in the evening, election night, confirmed his analysis.

CNN reported that 35 percent of respondents in its exit polls put the blame for the economic crisis on Wall Street, 29 percent blamed President Bush and 24 percent blamed President Obama.

Sixty-two percent of voters named the economy as the most important issue of this year, with health care coming in a distant second at 19 percent.

At 6 p.m. networks called the Senate election in Kentucky for tea partier Rand Paul. They made the call less than 30 minutes after stories broke that Paul, in exchange for campaign cash, has promised Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell that he would toe the leadership’s line in Washington even as he is promising tea partiers that he will “challenge McConnell every day.”

By 6:30 there were reports from Ohio that Democrats were leading in the gubernatorial race based on exit polls – much however, could change. That election is significant because, for the first time in history, Democrats would control each of three state offices responsible for re-districting. GOP control of re-districting in Ohio in the past was often key to GOP presidential election victories in that state. Ohio will be key to President Obama’s re-election race in 2012.

Labor was instrumental in pulling it out for Strickand and his victory would be a major damper on any Republican “wave” election night.

CONTRIBUTOR

John Wojcik is editor in chief at Peoplesworld.org. He started as labor editor of the People's World in May, 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There he served as a shop steward, as a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee, and as an activist in the union's campaign to win public support for Wal-Mart workers. In the 1970s and '80s he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper's predecessor, and active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.